Read Online Ambassador by William Alexander - Free Book Online

where she and Andrés and Noemi were, and why they weren’t all right there, and he didn’t know how to ask any of that either. He wanted to know if the twins were wearing tiny orange jumpsuits.
    â€œI didn’t stop at a stop sign,” Dad said. He said it as though that were an adequate explanation. Gabe just blinked, because it wasn’t really. “Not completely. I was sure that I did, but the officer said I didn’t come to a complete stop.”
    â€œOkay,” said Gabe. “That’s something you can get arrested for?”
    â€œNo,” said Dad. “But if you come to their attention, then they check your documents. And we don’t have any. Your mother used to. She had a visa at first. But I don’t. Never did.”
    He was trying to explain and trying to apologize and trying to understand himself how this had happened. Gabe knew that much, at least.
    â€œWe never meant to stay,” Dad went on. “We figured we were nomads, your mother and I, and I always thought that by now we’d be in some other part of the world. But I had a friend who wanted to open up a restaurant here, so we came to help him out. We brought Lupe. And then we had you. Two kids kept us in one place for longerthan we planned. Then we made the place home. I never thought we’d make a home somewhere with no defenses against howling arctic winds, you know? But we did. We stayed here.”
    He paused. Gabe nodded once to keep his father talking.
    â€œThey’ll let your mother go soon,” Dad went on. “Her and the twins. Tonight or maybe tomorrow morning. I don’t know. But they’ll release her on recognizance .” He said the awkward, official words slowly. The syllables obviously tasted bitter to him. “They still want to deport her, but that’ll take months to happen. More than a year, maybe. And she doesn’t have to pay a bond now, luckily. They’ll let the three of them go.”
    He said this in a reassuring way, or at least he tried to, but Gabe noticed immediately that his father hadn’t said anything at all about himself.
    â€œWhat about you?” Gabe asked. “When do they let you out?”
    His father smiled with only half of his mouth, the way he did whenever the car broke, or when anything else broke, or when snowplows scraped the streets clean of a blizzard but blocked the driveway with a two-foot wall of solid ice and slush that the landlord was supposed to shovel but never actually did. It was Dad’s this sucks expression.
    â€œMe, they will throw out of the country. Immediately. Tomorrow morning.” He paused to let that sink in. It didn’t really sink in. Gabe just stared at him. He went on. “I don’t get months of hearings and paperwork like your mother does because I’ve hopped the border before. I was a kid, first learning how to ride a motorcycle around the world. I got caught right away and sent home. So this is my second time getting deported, and there’s no way to contest a second time. Not for ten years. In a decade I’ll be allowed to ask permission for reentry, but not until then. Not even with four children on this side of the fence. And we can’t all go south. They won’t let us all go south. All this is going to take a long while to untangle, and we’re going to rack up some mighty big phone bills between now and then. Maybe you can mow a few lawns this summer, earn extra cash to buy some long-distance phone time?”
    Dad tried to maintain his half-smile, but he looked stricken. Whatever he felt right then, he was clearly trying hard not to feel it. His voice was half kidding, half serious, and entirely ashamed to tell Gabe that he would have to pitch in to pay for international phone bills.
    Gabe needed to make that expression leave his father’s face immediately, so he did the only thing he could think of. He leaned forward and spoke with the sort of